Bandcamp Most heavy-psych records pick a lane and ride it. three, the Frankfurt trio HUM’s follow-up to their 2022 debut ONE, does the opposite: it treats the fuzzed-out stoner riff as a starting point and then wanders off in every direction it can find. Across eleven tracks the band move from dusty, bass-led stoner sludge to gothic gloom, dark ambient, doomgaze, industrial pulse and outright musique concrete, themes drifting between environmental ruin, social decay and space travel. It is the work of three people, Harri Gottschalk, Martin Krause and Florian Schnaith, who clearly find a single genre too small to live in.
When they keep one foot in the riff it is excellent. “freaks of nature” is psychedelic stoner rock with a beautifully plastic, growling bass and a synth-lit break, and “ashes to ashes” is the highlight, all dynamic restraint, the near-spoken vocal sitting right in the middle of the mix before an almost silent break in the final third. The unifying thread is a refreshingly honest production: dynamics intact, no loudness-war crush, an earthy live feel that gives the bass enormous room. The fuzz sounds like an actual amp in an actual room, and across the rock tracks that warmth pays off.
Then there are the detours, and they are where your mileage will vary. “first contact” is pure dungeon-synth dark ambient with no guitars, bass or drums at all, “march of the lost souls” is built from scraped and struck metal objects, and the back third slides into cold industrial metal, the closer “the HUM” deliberately drowned in lo-fi, brickwalled murk. Some of this is genuinely evocative; some of it reads as sketchbook ideas that fragment the album rather than deepen it. The vocals, often buried as another texture, rarely give you a handhold, and the relentless low-mid focus leaves the whole thing short on air up top.
three is a brave, restless, genuinely individual record, and the parts where HUM weld their psychedelic heaviness to that dynamic, organic production are the best things here. It asks a lot of patience in return, and not every experiment earns its place across a long runtime. But there is a real vision driving it, and an unwillingness to repeat themselves that is rarer and more valuable than another tidy stoner album. Come for the riffs, stay for the strangeness, just know it does not hold your hand.
three is a restless, eclectic record that uses heavy-psych stoner rock as a launchpad for ambient, gothic, doomgaze and industrial detours. The production is its biggest strength on the rock tracks: warm, organic and genuinely dynamic, free of loudness-war compression, with a huge, growling bass and a real live-room feel (“freaks of nature” and “ashes to ashes” are the clearest showcases). The recurring limitations are a heavy low-mid focus that leaves the highs short on air and occasionally muddies dense passages, and vocals that often sit buried as another texture. The album also detours hard into beatless dark ambient (“first contact”), found-metal percussion (“march of the lost souls”) and a deliberately lo-fi, brickwalled industrial closer (“the HUM”), so the dynamic warmth of the band tracks is not consistent across the runtime. Brave and distinctive, if sprawling.
Standout tracks: ashes to ashes, freaks of nature
